The Underappreciated Eating Establishment Series: Tad's Steaks

Back in her Cornell days, Mama Jones’ boyfriend used to take her here.

“If you were lucky someone took you to Tad’s,” she told me.

According to the good woman, a meal for one person cost $3. And I thought my dates were cheap.

My friend Carolina’s parents had their first date at Tad’s, and she quoted an estimated $7 as the price of feeding an individual 12 ounces of flame-broiled stizzeak and a slew of carb-concentrated sides, which seemed a bit more realistic. Carolina has been to Tad’s many times with her folks and claims the prices have skyrocketed since her father wooed her mother over a 1/4 inch thick prime cut and a demi-bottle of rosé.

For me, the main appeal of the Tad’s experience was the potential to eat a red meat lunch for under ten dollars (and live long enough to justify a remedying jaunt to Del Frisco's to wash away the memories of steaks served fast food stylee). Sadly, the times of the bargain meal are truly at an end and unless we’re talking 25 cent Chinatown dumplings or Nicky’s Vietnamese Sandwiches ($3.95 a pop) you're throwing down bones to eat out in this town. If you’re bringing your chick to Tad’s be prepared to throw down a twenty-spot, and then some.

My coworker Frederico and I have been talking about hitting up Tad's since he drunkenly touted its awesomeness at a work birthday party many months ago. After much procrastination we finally set last Friday as the date to chow down and ambled into Tads’ 34th street establishment in the late afternoon of the last and laziest day of the work week.

When we hit the storefront around 2pm the place was still bustling. Frederico and I spent our first ten minutes in Tad's taking in our surroundings as we stood on line, discussing cuts of meat. Both of us ended up ordering the same cut off the menu that was displayed above us in a series of numbered pictures arranged completely without regard to logical numerical order.


Because 7 comes before 4.

After calling out our orders for Tad’s “Traditional Cut Prime Sirloin” to the line chef, we watched her cut two thin, pink, slimy steaks out of their vacuum packaging and slap them to the grill with a sizzle. I ordered my meat medium for the first time in my life. I live for dripping, tender, bloody steak, but I also like living in the absence of severe abdominal pain, thus my taste buds and intestines opted to forge a compromise.

When my meat, a foot long, 6 inches wide and the width of a single subject notebook, came off the grill it landed on a shallow, ten pound ceramic plate that was immediately doused in gravy, no questions asked. A baked potato joined the party and another ladleful of liquid, this time melted butter, was poured onto the overflowing dish. Onions were added by request (and recommended by Caroline) and the plate was finally handed off to it’s future consumer with liquid spillage over the sides of the ceramic an inevitability.

Once the steak plates were resting peacefully on our trays, Frederico and I pushed past the massive wall of beverages - fruit juice flanking cheap bottles of white wine, beer shouldering half-carafes of vinos, red and blush.


A king's selection.

But the real kicker for me was the thirty pre-poured glasses of assorted wine, each capped with a single piece of protective saran wrap.


Sealed for safety!

Frederico and I nudged our trays beyond the alcohol to the cashier where we were rung up for our biftek.

The “Traditional Cut,” which seemed to be the special or at least most popular cut, was $10.99 including a baked potato, a monster piece of slightly undercooked garlic bread and a salad. Charges were accrued for all extras, of course, including:

Sour cream - $ .69
Onions - $ .69
Aquafina - $ 2.00
TOMATOES - $ .69

The tomato charge really got to me. Without tomatoes, salad is food for bunny rabbits. Frederico noted that he doesn't even really LIKE tomatoes, but ended up eating two-thirds of a dollar since he didn't realize we were charged for the acidic fruit until we examined our receipts at the table.

We were brought to our cozy little spot in the Sizzler-esque dining room by the maitre d who, by the way, was at least seventy-years-old and really has no purpose in a restaurant that serves their food cafeteria style. Tad's should just abolish the maitre d position and use his salary to gift their customers with complementary tomatoes.

By the time we actually got down to eating I was motherloving starving. And the food was actually decent. The steak was a little tough, but definitely not unmanageable, and the super-thin gravy lent a flavorful, necessary juice to the super-thin meat. The portions were extraordinary – I swear my steak was the size of your average Frisbee – and even Miss Stacia’s ever-expanding stomach couldn’t house it all. The highlight of the meal for me was the potato, perhaps because it’s typical American mentality these days to deny ourselves the straight-up carbs, but I really do think it was the butter that made the tater so delectable. It turns out that drenching baked potatoes in butter sauce is really the most efficient way to coat your spuds in the salt and fat you truly crave.

And globs of sour cream don’t hurt either.

All-in-all, steak and potato for lunch was a nice way to change up the routine, but at fifteen bucks when you’re expecting to spend ten, it was kind of a rip. For eight more dollars I’ve got a choice cut filet with a fancy vegetable at an established eatery with a wine list and a hostess and chairs that don’t put my ass to sleep. But I won’t have the references to parental romances budding in the seventies, and plates dripping with juices, and flames licking thirty steaks simultaneously, and wine covered in cellophane, and sometimes the ability to revel in those things makes it worth occasionally going for the medium instead of the rare.